For many people, salt is a huge part of their diet, and cutting back can be very difficult. Unfortunatley, when battling heart issues or high blood pressure, cutting back on sodium intake is critical.

The firts step is identifying all the foods in your diet loaded with sodium. You might be shocked as to how many foods, particularly procressed foods and breads, are loaded with sodium. Things like soups are obvious culprits.

Then you need to consider how much salt you use with cooking. And this is one of the toughest adjustments for people, as salt makes food taste great.

But there are alternatives. This article has the excellent suggestion of using spices and hot sauces to augment the flavor of foods.

I’ve been using hot sauce for years. It works great with many dishes, and soup happens to be one of them. A bland lentil soup for example can taste incredibly good with some chili pepper sauce. Even with canned soup, you can buy the low sodium options and then splash in some hot sauce to make it taste better.

So educate yourself, but also be open to new flavors. You cna eat healthier but also make things more delicious.

The hunter-gatherer Hadza tibemen studied, although more active than Westerners, expended no more energy than those who are sedentary.

Although it is tempting to use simple math when trying to manage weight, it seems that processed, genetically modified food have an incalculable negative on human biology and weight maintenance.

So, if you are not hunting for your food on a daily basis, the next best thing is to eat simple, seasonal, unadulterated whole foods in their natural form.

Not surprisingly, the Hadza were more physically active than Westerners. However, they didn’t expend more energy. The Hadza’s average daily energy expenditure was no different than that of Westerners, after controlling for body size, the analysis found.

“We hypothesize that human daily energy expenditure may be an evolved physiological trait largely independent of cultural differences,” they write.

Unlike a growing portion of the Westernized world, however, the Hadza are lean. This suggests obesity rates in Westernized countries stem from differences in energy intake — meaning more rich food than our human ancestors ate, they conclude.

Hypothyroidism can be caused by a variety of things. In this country, diet is the main culprit. Our food supply is so deficient in nutrients and loaded with anti-nutrients that it’s really no surprise we are experiencing health problems in epidemic proportions. Vegetable oils (polyunsaturated fats) are a huge contributor to hypothyroidism, obesity, cardio vascular disease and other health problems. These are man-made foods that have only been around since the early 1900s, with soy oil becoming the number one cooking oil by the 1950s.

Soy products, like soy oil and protein, contain extremely high amounts of goitrogens. Goitrogens are naturally occurring substances that interfere with the normal function of the thyroid gland by blocking the synthesis of thyroid hormones and slowing ones metabolism. Before inexpensive polyunsaturated fats became common place, beef tallow, lard, olive oil and tropical oils were in use; heart disease, hypothyroidism, obesity, diabetes and other diseases were but a fraction of the incidence they are today.

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) is a widely used food additive that may lead to obesity. It is often present in processed foods although it is frequently not clearly labeled. MSG is frequently seen hiding behind such innocent-sounding names as hydrolyzed protein, vegetable protein, soy protein isolate, soy protein concentrate, whey protein, and natural flavoring, spices, enzymes, autolyzed yeast extract, stock, broth and carrageenan. If MSG was as benign as the food industry says it is, why do they have to disguise the name?

In a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers followed more than 10,000 adults in China for about 5.5 years on average. The researchers measured MSG intake directly by before-and-after weighing of products, such as bottles of soy sauce, to see how much people ate. They also asked people to estimate their intake over three 24-hour periods. Men and women who ate the most MSG (a median of 5 grams a day) were about 30 percent more likely to become overweight by the end of the study than those who ate the least amount of the flavoring (less than a half-gram a day), the researchers found. After excluding people who were overweight at the start of the study, the risk rose to 33 percent.”

As many of you know, there is a war against the sale and consumption of raw milk. The government, along with big business, has taken away your basic constitutional right to choose what you want to consume, by claiming it’s in the interest of public safety. However, is raw milk a danger to the public?

According to research conducted by Ted Beals, MD, and published in the 2011 issue of Wise Traditions, you’re more likely to get injured driving to the farm to pick up your raw milk than becoming ill drinking it.

From the perspective of a national public health professional looking at an estimated total of 48 million foodborne illnesses each year [from all foods]… there is no rational justification to focus national attention on raw milk, which may be associated with an average of 42 illnesses maximum among the more than nine million people (about 0.0005 percent) who have chosen to drink milk in its fresh unprocessed form.